Special Session OSEHC 2010 Abstracts

Full Papers Short Papers
Full Papers
Paper Nr: 5
Title:

Using Open Source To Create a Geographical Information System for Blood Donations
Authors:

Juliano Gaspar, Jorge Leal, João Azevedo, Fabio Hedayioglu and Ricardo J. Cruz-Correia
Abstract: The increasing development of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) paradigm has brought a reduction in the cost of software development and increased the speed of development, resulting in excellent quality software and constantly evolving. This paradigm provides powerful tools that facilitate the day-to-day institutions dramatically reducing the cost of technology. One kind of applications that enhances greatly this area are geographic information systems (GIS). They permit the allocation of raw data or processed information in a map, allowing contextualization of the information itself and the extrapolation of knowledge. The transfusion medicine is an excellent area of health in which one can use a GIS to display the geographic distribution of blood donors on the map. A FLOSS GIS is feasible in this context thus reducing the high governmental costs in Health Care area, the information can be easily displayed without copyrights and other complications. For these reasons, we decided to develop a platform that allows the display of information relative to the blood donations. Our goals focused on researching the state of the art off current status, data manipulation and processing relative of the donor’s database, modelling and developing a program that could show a varied option of queries that can be done to the database. We used some statistic approach to the data as well as software implementation. After its completion, it was possible to calculate the distribution of blood donors and cross reference this with the places of collect. The distribution of the donors by group or area was made visible for interpretation purposes. Ultimately, the feasibility of such systems is proved and the changes in blood donation management can represent an important improvement towards good care.
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Paper Nr: 6
Title:

The OpenHealth FLOSS implementation of the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 standard
Authors:

Santiago Carot-Nemesio, José A. Santos Cadenas, Pedro De-Las-heras-quiros and Jorge Bustos
Abstract: The OpenHealth project aims to provide the first complete Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) implementation of the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 personal health standards over Bluetooth transport. A manager has been implemented in Java, tested both in Linux desktops and on the Android platform against thermometer agents. The MCAP and HDP Bluetooth profiles have also been implemented in BlueZ, the offcial Linux Bluetooth protocol stack. This implementation has been successfully tested with a Nonin Onyx II 9560 pulse oximeter, the first medical device that implements the HDP Bluetooth profile and the ISO/IEEE 11073 data protocol.
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Paper Nr: 7
Title:

Electrocardiogram Rhythm Simulation in Open Source Environment - a contribution to training in biomedical sciences
Authors:

Antonio Martins, Paulo D. Costa, Joao M. Marques and Ricardo J. Cruz-Correia
Abstract: Considering the importance of training and the need to identify some important electrocardiographic patterns, our aim was to develop a software-based electrocardiogram rhythm simulator, able to generate signals for purposes of training health care professionals, freely available. Additionally we intended to implement a training assessment and the ability to configure specific rhythms/patterns with user-defined settings. In order to achieve the availability requirement we decided to develop our tool as open source. All the software was developed in Linux platform, but releases are available in binary format for Linux and Microsoft Windows platform. The result was a functional signal simulator which satisfied all the requirements we proposed in our aim. The final result of our work is presented and available at Sourceforge.
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Paper Nr: 8
Title:

A NEED FOR AN INTEROPERABLE OPEN SOURCE MIDDLEWARE FOR AMBIENT ASSISTED LIVING APPLICATIONS - A Position Paper
Authors:

Sten Hanke, Christopher Mayer, Johannes Kropf and Andreas hochgatterer
Abstract: Recent European population projections underlined demographic developments towards an ”ageing society”. A challenge of the future is ”ageing well at home” assisted by technology, while maintaining a high degree of independence, autonomy and dignity. Ambient Assisted Living technologies try to follow this objective by integrating intelligent assistance-systems in people’s homes. So in future there will be a high demand on AAL applications which should fulfil different needs of user groups and daily living scenarios. To speed up the development process and to make the applications more adaptive and flexible to special user needs a common middleware with standardised interfaces would be desirable. This should be an open-source middleware, which operates as an interconnection layer to the operating system and as basis for applications and services. Furthermore the implementation of different frameworks and standards is preferable to ensure the interoperability of different systems and overlapping domains in AAL. The open source approach can be essential to initiate a community of different stakeholders and to reuse software components with a common understanding on the implemented standards. The paper shows the need of such an interoperable middleware and gives recommendations of standards and frameworks to follow. The paper explains why the open source approach is a chance to fulfil the mentioned motivations. As a first approach the EU IST FP6 project MPOWER is introduced, which could be the basic fundament of such a middleware approach. It is an example for an open source service oriented platform providing encapsulated AAL and health related services
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Paper Nr: 11
Title:

An Open Source Screen Reader for Blind and Visually Impaired People – Experiences and Thoughts
Authors:

Martina Weicht, Frank Zenker, Ilvio Bruder and Andreas Heuer
Abstract: Developing open source software offers great potential for sustainable software evolution and for software product distribution, holding particular advantages in financial, psychological, security, and other aspects. However, lots of effort and fortunate circumstances are needed enforce them. This paper will take a look at open source software development and its success factors using the example of the SUE screen reader project. This project deals with supporting blind and visually impaired users on Linux by providing alternative access to the graphical user interface. The development of SUE is an interesting example of FLOSS development in the eHealth area. We will introduce SUE and provide an overview of our open source development experiences discussing a special factor in the success of open source development: communities.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 9
Title:

Development of an Open Source Provider and Organization Registry Service for Regional Health Networks
Authors:

Oliver Heinze, Björn Bergh and Alexander Ihls
Abstract: In the Rhine-Neckar Region a Healthcare Information Exchange Network (HIEN) should be implemented providing a personal electronic health record for patients and health professionals. Therefore a standards-based architecture following IHE profiles especially from the IT-Infrastructure domain was conceptualized. One of the central components will be a provider and organization registry service (PORS) in order to provide a unique identification and to resolve identifications to concrete information. Each network partner has to be registered via manual data entry or preferably by standards-based massage interaction (HL7 v2 MFN M02). The PORS will be implemented as open source project using current technologies in order to be a reference implementation to be available for other related projects. It consists of a multi-tier-layer architecture fitting into an over-all service oriented architecture. A PORS will be a central component of any HIEN to provide a unique identifier and to resolve information of providers and organization. The described open source project can be used by other related projects to avoid the reinvention of the wheel.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPEN SOURCE WEB PORTAL FOR THE EXCHANGE OF MEDICAL DATA
Authors:

Benjamin Schneider, Oliver Heinze, Kai Lederle, Björn Bergh and Gerald Weisser
Abstract: The Teleradiology/Emergency Medicine Network in the Metropolitan Rhine-Neckar Region (Germany) enables the exchange of medical data. However, the inclusion is difficult because of technical reasons for some partners like general practitioners. For that reason a web portal for the exchange of medical data within the Teleradiology/Emergency Medicine Network is under development. The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) e-mail standard offers the base for the data exchange. The portal itself will be developed by Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Java Servlets. The data will be saved in a MySQL database. The external DocCheck authentication service will be integrated additionally to the internal user administration. The concept has been finished and the portal is under development. The concept foresees that the web server is located in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) of the Heidelberg University Hospital and the database is running within the clinical network. The portal offers the possibility to use the Teleradiology/Emergency Medicine Network without any charge.
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